novels

I’m trying to have another light day. It’s the weekend. And it’s Sunday:

Free Stock Photo: Illustration of a man sleeping in a hammock.

However, yesterday I started giving Distances a read thru. I plan to continue today. It’s now nearly 90,000 words and maddeningly close to being completed and read in full by someone other than myself.

If you are partly “Italian-American” (as I am), and that ancestry stems from you being a product of immigrants who arrived in the U.S. between about 1870-1914 (as I am), it’s likely you grew up with a complicated relationship with Italy.

My maternal great-grandparents were all Italian immigrants. My grandparents were born in the U.S. Some in my mother’s U.S.-born generation were reared to be utterly indifferent to Italy.

Free Stock Photo: Italian flag in blue sky.

Perhaps World War II had an impact. Benito Mussolini had been a difficult, divisive subject in families like mine pre-war. However, after he joined the war in 1940, and particularly after he declared war on the U.S. in late 1941, he became America’s enemy who needed to be smashed and that was that.

Yesterday I realized it has now been over a month since I’ve shared any of the Distances rough draft here. I worked more on this part yesterday also, and thought as I finished that it merited a “sneak peek.” It all “happens” in “James’s” mind shortly after he has landed in Italy for the first time and is being chauffeured to a Rome hotel along with three rather familiar women.

I spent a good part of yesterday with new characters “Brad” and “Clémence,” as well as with a couple of “old timers,” and filling in additional details and description in several chapters. In the process, I dropped in a couple of thousand more words at least. I became so immersed in it all, I lost track of the time.

The afternoon flew by. As I finished up, I realized again just how unwilling I am to let go of “my friends” quite yet. I’m not “done” with them by any means.

I ended up again pondering what could follow immediately after Distances. I know there will be a fourth novel eventually, and I already know its very general contours. But I’m now pretty drained mentally from writing these first three, and I suspect I will need something of a “sabbatical” to recharge.

Free Stock Photo: A pile of antique books.

I had been mulling over the idea of taking “six months” post-Distances and declaring, “Eh, that’ll do for now.” It seemed reasonable. After all, three novels of nearly 100,000 words each over three years is nothing to sneeze at.

I have literally awoken at times around 3am, my mind for some reason fixating on some plot point or statement. I wonder, “Did I leave *that* out? Did she say that?” It’s a sick feeling that can ruin a night’s sleep.

So far – luckily – whenever I have had that happen, on frantic double-checking I discover everything is fine, and I breathe out. When writing a series, you need a perfect memory. You can’t miss a thing, because even a minor oversight or “misremembering” a tiny “fact” from earlier can prove pretty embarrassing later on.

[Selfie, 2015.]I’ve been rereading Passports at length over the last few days. It’s the first time I’ve done so in at least a year. As I do, I’m finding I’m also struck by how the books are “evolving” from that opener.

We know there are the “sneak peeks” that the likes of Amazon use to drive sales. But that is not always enough. Much as with musicians who do free gigs and artists who display paintings merely to be seen, when you are lesser known as an independent author it is certainly unreasonable to expect readers to part with money for your work until they believe it is worth it.

So making a novel free is often necessary. Still, it does go against the grain to offer complete free books to enable readers to get to know your work when yours aren’t “shorts” produced every few months for quickie consumption. It’s a lot easier psychologically to give away 1 “short” book when you have “16” others out there, than it is to give away a 400 page novel when you have only 2 of them.

* * *

Much is also made of the fact that independent novels, be they shorts or full-length, are imperfect. They may have, for example, typos:

Yesterday evening I hit one of my interim targets for Distances, the third novel. Every chapter in the manuscript is now, more or less, under control. The scope of the book is largely settled.

Within my outline, I write wherever my mind takes me. I “finished” the book somewhere in middle of the last third of it, when two chapters that had been only “skeletons” up to that point were filled in generally at last. Having done that, I sat stunned briefly.

French air force overflight. Bastille Day parade, Paris, July 1995. [Photo by me.]

My mind then took me forward to the next book. I’m unprepared mentally to say “goodbye” to these characters yet. Quickly, I stopped myself from thinking that far ahead.

Today is the fifth and final day Passports is FREE on Kindle. If you’ve downloaded it – or do – during this span, I hope you enjoy it. And speaking of Kindle:

Screen capture of Twitter.

Recently, a Lexie Syrah was interviewed by CBC radio. She says she has published 17 books, and has pulled her Kindle titles from Kindle Unlimited. She’s angry about Kindle’s changed payment terms for Unlimited and the lending library.

If you as a reader even care, since July 1 authors are paid per number of pages borrowers read the first time they read a borrowed Kindle book, not merely for the book as a whole having been borrowed. Kindle tells us authors that authors themselves have sought this change: